Two small features Twitter needs

In the past few days two people who were not following me sent me direct messages (DM) on Twitter. Neither of us realized the asymmetrical nature of our “relationship” until I had to actually e-mail (oh the horror) them back to suggest they follow me so I could reply.

It is a small annoyance – but something Twitter could fix by notifying a user if the DM they are going to send cannot be reciprocated. Or — how about an auto-follow when you send a direct message to someone who is already following you?

Another more useful tool would be a rating (5%, 20%, 95% etc) connected to individual tweets to indicate how new, or valuable, a given message may be to your followers. If 99% of them already follow the person you are retweeting, you might think twice about rebroadcasting it

I wanted this Saturday when sending a RT – wondering how many of the people who follow me had already seen the message and link. I am not totally convinced this would encourage more productive retweeting, but it is a type of network feedback seems necessary as Twitter grows and becomes more important as a news distribution platform.